Limousins: The Jalopies of Cattle

 

Limousin cattle are the devil's own breed. I hate them. They can be bat crap crazy and totally unpredictable. They're good for only one thing: Eating. Make that two things: Shooting and Eating. Other than that, I don't want to see them. I like Herefords and Charolais and Black Angus. 

Some lessons you learn the hard way. The really hard way. You either survive and you learn from them, or you don't, period. When you're in a hurry, you can make the absolute stupidest of mistakes. 

To clear the air as to why she was there in the first place: I didn't buy a limousin heifer on purpose. That female mutt of an excuse for a bovine was mixed in with a group of other heifers I did want at the Sale Barn. So I actually paid good money for an animal I would have normally spared a 12 point buck's life over to shoot instead.  

You often hear that "double muscled" garbage about calves from Limousin bulls. Yeah, and half-brained and all of that being murder. 

Fall came, and it was time to ship the herd to Cookstown for slaughter. I was going to miss them. They were a nice, calm, docile group of heifers. Then there was her. 

Naturally, when we rounded them up to go, we couldn't get her in. No way, no how. I wasn't surprised. I had expected that. But, I had a Plan. I had several large chain link fence sections I got at some auction somewhere. I shut the other cattle in one end of the barnyard behind the regular gate that was there, and put one chain link fence section that had a man gate in it across the opposite end. I left the man gate open. The Plan was, I would leave them like that overnight. Missing the other animals, she would step in through the man gate during the night to be near them. In the morning, with the farm half way around my Ottawa Citizen rural paper route, I'd just come in, sneak around past the barn, and come up and close the man gate, and then I'd have her. 

The Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men... 

I got home, and crept out to the barnyard in the chilly, late dawn of that late fall morning. Sure enough, there she was, inside the chain link section to be near the other cattle, just as I figured. I tiptoed up, and closed the man gate with a click. 

If you ask me why, I can not tell you. Maybe it was the rush. Maybe it was the urgency. Maybe it was adrenaline from the whole thing of catching her messing up my head. 

When I closed that gate, I was INSIDE it. With her. 

You know the way a mousetrap is a noise and an action at the same time? Well, that was pretty much the way it was with her. All 900 pounds of her. She didn't run away from me. Oh, no. Not her. No, she ran straight for me, killin' on her devilish mind. She smashed me up against the door that led to the area where the barnyard pumphouse was. She ground me into the door and backed up and butted me into it. Using her unbelievably powerful neck muscles, she brushed me back and forth across that door and up and down like a rag doll. I couldn't even control my arms the way she was flailing me around. There was nothing I could do, nothing I could get a hold of. I was just thinking, "This is it... ", when the door gave way behind me and flew open and her driving force just tossed me out like a crumpled sheet of newspaper with it. 

And she was gone.

What had happened was that door had a sliding bolt for a latch. While she was grinding my helpless body back and forth across the door, my left shoulder blade engaged the bolt and shot it open. The door instantly gave way and I lived to tell about it. 

Whatever in the world made me step through that man gate I don't know and can't tell you but I did. It was one of the dumbest mistakes of my entire life and I almost paid WITH my life. Thankfully I managed to live through it. It may be very well been mere coincidence and happenstance, but you still can't convince me it simply wasn't my time to go and that's how she shot that door bolt with my shoulder blade.

When I picked my aching body back up off the ground, I looked out into the only pasture she could have gotten to from the yard beyond that door. There she was, about 250 yards out, standing there sideways, looking right at me, sides heaving, with grey clouds of vapour shooting out of her nostrils. 

Yewww durdy pieca... 

I was pretty bruised up all over, but no broken bones and still living and breathing to see another day.

She got part of her wish. She was free. But I wasn't dead.

I got part of my wish later that day. I shot her right there where she still stood out in that pasture. Then I got the other part of my wish: I ate her over the course of the next year. So she was actually good for something after all.